Case Study: The Home Depot Data Breach

by Brett Hawkins

The theft of payment card information has become a common issue in today's society. Even after the lessons learned from the Target data breach, Home Depot's Point of Sale systems were compromised by similar exploitation methods. The use of stolen third-party vendor credentials and RAM scraping malware were instrumental in the success of both data breaches. Home Depot has taken multiple steps to recover from its data breach, one of them being to enable the use of EMV Chip-and-PIN payment cards. Is the use of EMV payment cards necessary? If P2P (Point-to-Point) encryption is used, the only method available to steal payment card data is the installation of a payment card skimmer. RAM scraping malware grabbed the payment card data in the Home Depot breach, not payment card skimmers. However, the malware would have never been installed on the systems if the attackers did not possess third-party vendor credentials and if the payment network was segregated properly from the rest of the Hom...